Page 201 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

Y O UR CL OUD STRATEG Y: WHAT KIND O F COMPANY DO Y O U W ANT?

manufacturing had seen enough and openly called for a new
product design, with specifications to be delivered to manu-
facturing in record time. He had no authority to do this, but
everyone knew that he was right to demand action.
In an unusual move, the manufacturing manager, for-
merly derided as “a nuts and bolts guy,” was named as the

head of a new product design team. He immediately insisted
that two peers in other parts of the organization, over whom
he had no authority, were indispensable members of the team.
They were coworkers with whom he had been engaged in the
background debate. The CEO approved the nominations. Out
of the shadows stepped what amounted to a multimember,
cross-disciplinary team of planners, designers, marketers, and

engineers who had been watching the company’s inaction
with growing alarm.
This team was self-selected, based on a web of invisible
contacts and personal networking, but now its shadow orga-
nization had to become explicit. IT’s advance work in imple-
menting cloud computing as a business platform was about to
pay off. The team self-provisioned several virtual servers, one
to serve as a wiki, an e-mail aggregation server, a “who we are”
team biography Web page, and a Web portal with various soft-

ware tools for blogging and building a library of references
and documents. Each member was given a blog on which to
post his measure of progress once a day, and also air criticisms
of and support for other members of the team. There were no
rules governing this discourse other than that it had to be di-
rect, it had to be transparent (no hidden agendas), and it could
not become personal. As long as someone is commenting on

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